Harness-Zero: Harness Distillation via Agent-as-Harness
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
arXiv:2608. 08466v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern LLM agents are often improved by modifying prompts, tools, or workflows manually, while the executable scaffold surrounding the model---the \emph{harness}---is typically treated as a fixed artifact after deployment.
arXiv:2609.01437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As agents move from research prototypes to deployed tools, their capability increasingly depends on model-external execution infrastructure, commonly...
arXiv:2609.09134v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent harnesses (the system prompt, tool set, execution hooks, and context-management scaffolding around a model) are a critical determinant of agentic...
EVOHARNESSBENCH is a new benchmark that tests how LLM-based agents handle changes in their tool, skill, and agent harnesses over time. It includes 17 deterministic harness streams with 802 tasks, 520 tools, 42 skills, and 62 agents, and evaluates agents in two settings: deployment evaluation and self‑evolving adaptation evaluation. The study finds that harness expansion can cause forgetting, adaptation gains are inconsistent, and preserving old competence does not always aid new capability adaptation, highlighting harness evolution as a distinct challenge for agent development.
arXiv:2609.04280v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern LLM-based agents operate through a harness of tools, reusable skills, and specialist agents that shapes what they observe and what the...
The paper introduces CHART, a curriculum that rotates harnesses during training to teach search agents parallel search strategies robustly across different harness configurations. Unlike static harness augmentation, CHART gradually consolidates behavior by graduating learned harnesses and replacing them, maintaining a reward gap that drives learning. Experiments show CHART enables agents to parallelize on 89% of held‑out harnesses, improves performance on a new QA task by 5.6pp, and benefits more from meta‑harness search than baselines.